Illinois Field renovation more than a decade in the making – The News-Gazette

CHAMPAIGN — Dan Hartleb has had drawings for potential Illinois Field renovations in his office for more than a decade.

It was a topic Illinois explored in earnest in 2015 during the baseball program’s 50-10-1 season and Super Regional appearance. Hosting both the regional and super regional rounds put Illinois Field in the spotlight.

Extra bleachers were installed. Chairback cushions were added to the permanent seating. Tents were erected to designate specific standing-room-only sections.

All that was temporary.

Hartleb’s plans have long been to make those needed additions during that postseason run permanent.

Like 3,000 chairback seats. Bleachers for a student section beyond the left-field wall. A larger concourse and an expanded and elevated press box.

While some aesthetic changes have been made in the last decade, Hartleb’s wish list remained just that for the home of Illinois baseball that opened in 1988, received lights in 1999 and had a FieldTurf surface first installed in 2008. The $8 million Atkins Baseball Training Center opened in 2023.

A further $5 million gift from an anonymous donor announced Thursday will provide some of what Hartleb was looking for during the program’s most impressive season, topped by a 1,500-plus seat renovation with permanent chairbacks.

New, expanded dugouts are also planned along with additional seating down the first- and third-base lines.

“The baseball project has been a long time in the works,” Illinois athletic director Josh Whitman said Thursday during his annual summer discussion with local media. “I appreciate Dan Hartleb, who has been very patient with us as we have worked through some different ideas as we’ve been able to find and identify the resources to do this.”

The current seating bowl at Illinois Field will be cleared completely and replaced with the permanent chairback seats. The dugouts will be expanded to make room for technology upgrades, storage space and bathrooms.

“Hartleb’s getting older,” Whitman quipped. The Illinois coach just completed his 21st season leading the program and 36th total in Champaign and is the all-time wins leader with 625 victories for the Illini. “He doesn’t like going back and forth to the clubhouse the way that he’s had to, so we told him we’d get him a can there in the dugout.”

Whitman said the goal is still further Illinois Field renovations. Identifying additional funding — a donor-driven process — will dictate the next steps the Illini can take.

The same constraints are in place for a proposed combined training facility for Illinois volleyball and wrestling, with both teams calling Huff Hall home and having do so for decades. The Illini wrestling program had promised donations for $10 million of the initial $14 million cost from three families for a 19,000-square foot training center in 2022. Plans to break ground on the south lawn of State Farm Center in 2024 were put on hold that year because of a $5 million shortfall of what became a $15 million project.

Whitman said plans for a combined volleyball and wrestling facility were still in the “exploratory stages.” The DIA has engaged with architects to get a grasp on a possible location and the potential full scope of the project.

“We’ve done this with other sports where we focused on practice facilities first,” Whitman said. “Not surprisingly, success has followed. We’re going to take a similar approach with those sports. Those are sports we want to provide an enhanced day-to-day home. Huff will continue to be our competition venue. There’s a lot of history in Huff. We are aware that it does, increasingly, have some parking challenges.

“We need to finalize the plan. We need to finalize the location. We need a good sense of cost. At some point, we will engage with a lot of different people about that project. Not just people who support wrestling, but people who support volleyball, as well.”

Illinois is finalizing plans for a further expansion of Demirjian Indoor Golf Facility. The addition will be on the north end of the building and provide new staff offices, a new locker room and other team spaces. The expectation is to break ground this fall.

The biggest ongoing facilities project remains Gies Memorial Stadium. Four areas are being addressed ahead of the 2026 season, with wireless internet coverage, a new sound system, new lights and the installation of the largest videoboard in college football. The goal is to have the videoboard complete in mid-July with its potential debut part of a Busey Family Movie Night at the stadium.

“Because of some comments made by our friend (Illinois basketball player) David Mirkovic, the movie might be ‘Air Bud,’ which is apparently one of his favorites,” Whitman said. “We’re going to dust that off from the archives and see what that looks like on the world’s largest videoboard.”

Further plans for Gies Memorial Stadium include a look at both the east and west sides — with some permanent chairback seats being considered — and using what was Illinois football’s recruiting lounge underneath the north stands as a premium fan space.

What isn’t in Illinois’ plans are wholesale changes to the south horseshoe, which Whitman said would run in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

“There isn’t really the opportunity to do a lot of incremental work in the horseshoe,” the Illinois athletic director continued. “Either you do essentially a little or you do all of it. What we have done is we’ve redone every bathroom. We’ve added new points of sale. We’ve expanded the concourse. We’ve created new pedestrian thoroughfares behind the horseshoe to hopefully ease some of the traffic down there.

“We want to maintain that as a family friendly, economical option for fans. This year a season ticket in the horseshoe is $115 dollars. It’s one of the most affordable tickets in all of Big Ten football. If we were to dramatically change the south horseshoe, that would dramatically change the price point for those seats, as well.”